Is DNA Beyond Darwinism?

A recent scientific study says that human beings are not originally of the Earth.

We Are Not Alone
Vladimir I shCherbak of al-Farabi Kazakh National University of Kazakhstan, and Maxim A Makukov of the Fesenkov Astrophysical Institute, have an amazing theory that can knock your socks off. They have come to the conclusion after researching for years on the subject that we, as in human beings living on Earth, are not originally of the Earth. Moreover, we are not alone in the Universe, either.

Alien Origin
So where are we ‘of ’ in that case? What’s our native place? Also, if this is true, then how did we end up evolving ourselves into sentient beings from prehistoric single-celled organisms that first crawled out of the primeval slime, some 3.5 billion years ago? Surely no one can deny that that’s how it happened because there’s solid scientific evidence behind it which is provable and which almost all biologists and other life scientists believe in, whether they’re theists or not.

Made In?
Well, shCherbak and Makukov hypothesise that “our genes could have an intelligently designed ‘manufacturer’s stamp’ inside them, written eons ago elsewhere in our galaxy”, as Discovery News broke the story recently. Such a ‘designer label’ would be an indelible stamp on our DNA of a master extraterrestrial civilisation that preceded us by many millions or even billions of years. As their ultimate legacy, they recast the Milky Way in their own biological image. Sounds familiar?

Biological SETI
Yet, that’s not all. Writing in the journal Icarus, the two scientists say that such a signal embedded in our genetic code would be a mathematical and semantic message that cannot be accounted for by Darwinian evolution. They call it ‘biological SETI’ — the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence — that’s been ongoing for over four decades now without finding anything. “Once fixed, the code might stay unchanged over cosmological timescales; in fact, it’s the most durable construct known. Therefore, it represents an exceptionally reliable storage for an intelligent signature. Once the genome is appropriately rewritten, the new code with a signature will stay frozen in the cell and its progeny, which might then be delivered through space and time.”

The Code
Makukov and shCherbak assert that simple arrangements of the code reveal an ensemble of arithmetical and ideographical patterns of symbolic language. This includes, they say, the use of decimal notation, logical transformations, and the utilisation of the abstract symbol of zero. “Accurate and systematic, these underlying patterns appear as a product of precision logic and nontrivial computing,” they write.

The Panspermia Theory
Actually, there’s a name for these theories. It’s called panspermia and it’s been floating around for millennia — that life came to our planet from elsewhere, carried perhaps by meteors and asteroids which got seeded before being flung across space to land here. This latest theory, however, makes it sound less like serendipitous happenstance and more like a well thought out experimental endeavour with a purpose, by entities who wanted to leave their signature behind on a part of the universe.

Treading Cautiously
Most scientists tread cautiously around such ideas before accepting them because even if they might be true, they’re still either un-testable or un-falsifiable. But then, consider the case of professor Antony Flew, the renowned British philosopher belonging to the analytic school of thought, who for more than half a century, was considered the world’s leading atheist. He advocated the need for believing that one should always presuppose the non-existence of God until empirical evidence proves otherwise.

Atheist Turns Believer
In December 2004, Flew, aged 81, shocked his followers and the rest of the believing and unbelieving world by saying that he had changed his mind and now believed in God — more or less based on scientific evidence — because a super-intelligence was the only good explanation for the origin of life.

An Intelligent God
And what was this evidence? In a publicly released video called Has Science Discovered God?, Flew specifically stated that biologists’ investigation of human DNA “has shown, by the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements which are needed to produce (life), that intelligence must have been involved.” That’s exactly what Messrs shCherbak and Makukov are now reporting.